Hammond surveys some popular arguments (Carr, Birkerts, Sharkey) regarding the impacts of digital culture, social media, or online reading uponreading practices and the consumption (analysis and appreciation) of conventional litearture. Davidson and Hayles are enlisted to deepend the discussion by reframing it in terms of changes to reading practices (helping us escape the binaries about life/death of the book; or better/worse reading).
Equally useful, Hammond draws from Adriaan van Der Weel's Changing our Textual Minds a set of seven dimensions ("salient properties") distinguishing print and digital texts (12-13):
Textual instability
Ease and low cost of copying
Speed
Two-way traffic
Lack of heirarchy
Convergence of modalities
Access through content (i.e. full text, rather than bibliographic categories).
The descriptions further enrich the labels above, and the emphasis is on more conventional web-based reading, Kindle books, etc. but the analytical media-specific perspective is a good model (and can be adapted to the more innovative, emergent genres we're studying in this class).
Of similar use is Hammond's careful distinction between modality and medium: modality is a type of information that can be communicated through a medium. . . . In the course of this book we will deal with four artistic modalities: text, still images, moving images, and sound.
Commentary
The chapter helps to raise the issues about the status of digital texts and begins to provide a sufficient vocabularly for charting an intelligent path through this terrain. There are, however, missing elements.
Does the medium/modality distinction or seven dimensions of digital texts give us a sufficient vocabulary for addressing the kinds of interactivity built into digital texts like "My Body" or "Inanimate Alice?" Does it include differences of "interface"? Can we name other modalities?
Question
What aspects of Hammond's framework and vocabulary seem most useful to you? How would you apply it to works we've read so far? What dimensions does it not quite account for?
Summary
Hammond surveys some popular arguments (Carr, Birkerts, Sharkey) regarding the impacts of digital culture, social media, or online reading uponreading practices and the consumption (analysis and appreciation) of conventional litearture. Davidson and Hayles are enlisted to deepend the discussion by reframing it in terms of changes to reading practices (helping us escape the binaries about life/death of the book; or better/worse reading).Equally useful, Hammond draws from Adriaan van Der Weel's Changing our Textual Minds a set of seven dimensions ("salient properties") distinguishing print and digital texts (12-13):
- Textual instability
- Ease and low cost of copying
- Speed
- Two-way traffic
- Lack of heirarchy
- Convergence of modalities
- Access through content (i.e. full text, rather than bibliographic categories).
The descriptions further enrich the labels above, and the emphasis is on more conventional web-based reading, Kindle books, etc. but the analytical media-specific perspective is a good model (and can be adapted to the more innovative, emergent genres we're studying in this class).Of similar use is Hammond's careful distinction between modality and medium: modality is a type of information that can be communicated through a medium. . . . In the course of this book we will deal with four artistic modalities: text, still images, moving images, and sound.
Commentary
The chapter helps to raise the issues about the status of digital texts and begins to provide a sufficient vocabularly for charting an intelligent path through this terrain. There are, however, missing elements.Does the medium/modality distinction or seven dimensions of digital texts give us a sufficient vocabulary for addressing the kinds of interactivity built into digital texts like "My Body" or "Inanimate Alice?" Does it include differences of "interface"? Can we name other modalities?
Question
What aspects of Hammond's framework and vocabulary seem most useful to you? How would you apply it to works we've read so far? What dimensions does it not quite account for?